Scheherazade & Friend

By R.Z. Sheppard

CHIMERA by JOHN BARTH 308 pages. Random House. $6.95.

John Barth is one of those hyper-talented writers who must continually prove that the world of fiction is round, not flat, as most novels would lead one to believe. The problem is that Barth keeps turning up afterward looking as fresh as if he had only just come back from a day sail. From The Floating Opera and The End of the Road to The Sot-Weed Factor and Giles Goat-Boy, there is no real urgency in Earth's novels. His characters exhibit a comfortable, charming nihilism. Fat with alternatives, they can change roles as easily as socks. As an immortal resident of Parnassus tells the hallucinating hero of The Sot-Weed Factor, "There's really naught in the world up here but clever music."

Chimera is a coy variation on a number of Barth's favorite themes. Composed in three parts, "Dunyaza-diad," "Perseid" and "Bellerophoniad," the book is largely a gag at the expense of conventional literary forms. Instead of having characters symbolize archetypes as most novelists do, Barth uses the archetypes themselves as characters. Fortunately for the reader, Barth --who is also an English professor at the Buffalo campus of the State University of New York --provides a pony. (Pegasus by any name is just as helpful.) As he explains in Chimera: "Since myths themselves are among other things poetic distillations of our ordinary psychic experience...to write realistic fictions which point always to mythic archetypes is in my opinion to take the wrong end of the mythopoetic stick..."

Barth's trick is to bend the old Golden Bough into fairy tales about the ordinary daily reality of archetypes. So we find Perseus, the slayer of Medusa, bogged down in middle age and suffering from what might be called hero's block. "You saw how it was," he says to his mistress, a nymph. "The kids were grown and restless; Andromeda and I had become different people; our marriage was on the rocks. The kingdom took care of itself; my fame was sure enough--but I'd lost my shine with golden locks."

Perseus gets the chance to recapture his youth when Athena re-Gorgonizes Medusa. Only this time Perseus has to pull off the caper without the old tricks --winged shoes, helmet of invisibility, etc. The problem is akin to that of an experienced novelist who cannot use old techniques to write a new novel, and Barth seems to get quite a chuckle out of it.

In "Bellerophoniad," the domesticated archetype is Bellerophon, tamer of the winged horse, killer of the fire-breathing Chimera, conqueror of the Amazons and generally a favorite of the gods. Barth renders Bellerophon's adventures into a dizzying situation comedy in which metaphors are homogenized and characters recede into their own stories and reappear so that the middle of one man's tale could be another's beginning or ending. Both "Perseid" and "Bellerophoniad" spin on little else than the axis of Barth's cleverness, and both wobble badly.

"Dunyazadiad" is a different story (within a story within a story) and a winged horse of a brighter color. In it Barth succeeds with clarity, succinctness and natural ease in creating a modern tale out of the oldest forms of storytelling. It is about Scheherazade's famous plight as told by her younger sister Dunyazade, who sat at the foot of the bed for 1,001 nights while the Shah made love to Scheherazade and was held spellbound by her stories. It may be recalled that before the Shah met "Sherry," as she is known in the bedchamber, he had been habituated to deflowering a virgin each night and beheading her in the morning. It was a sure preventive against cuckoldry.

But art and love--which become pretty much the same thing before Barth gets through--soothe the Shah. Art and love are among the few things that Barth seems to take very seriously. They are beyond the reach of his word webs, or, as Scheherazade says: "Making love and telling stories both take more than good technique--but it's only the technique that we can talk about."

One of Barth's best bits of technique is to have Scheherazade get each night's installment from a Barth-like writer who magically appears each day after boning up on his copy of The Arabian Nights. They also talk of mutual prob lems with such tenderness and under standing that the question of who is muse and who is bemused becomes a beautiful irrelevance. For Barth, a writ er who must keep himself going with self-conscious irony and ambiguity and tricks, Scheherazade is a literary dream girl. She told stories only out of the most urgent necessity: to save her lovely neck.

R.Z. Sheppard

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